Fuck yeah, I am. The source of my disappointment is Paul’s latest, Why America Is Getting Tough on Trade, the very title an irritant for the homage it pays to the meme that “getting tough” is always a good idea. Paul’s “nut graph” (I think that’s what it is) reads as follows:
This is a very big deal, much bigger than Trump’s tariff tantrums. The Biden administration has turned remarkably tough on trade, in ways that make sense given the state of the world but also make me very nervous. Trump may have huffed and puffed, but Biden is quietly shifting the basic foundations of the world economic order.
Well, it makes me very nervous as well, because I think it’s a terrible idea, but unfortunately Paul gets over his fit of nerves in the course of an 800-word column and concludes with a chest-thumping shout out to what strikes me as out and out economic nationalism. We aren’t sabotaging the world’s economy! We’re “protecting democracy and saving the planet”! And those are good things!
The ”protecting democracy” part refers to the Biden administration’s subsidies for American chip manufacturers and its decision to deny China access to our high-end technology. I don’t think the subsidies are going to work nearly as well as Paul wants to believe, or even pretends to believe, and I don’t think that pretending a nation of a billion plus people doesn’t exist is a good idea either. Russia’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine and the resultant European fuel crisis were the direct result of America’s determination to “lead” and promote democracy in an area of the world where we had no vital interests. Now we are fixing to do the same thing in Asia, even further away, against a nation that is, I would say, ten times more formidable than Russia. The notion that all we have to do in international affairs is to be “firm” and we will get whatever we want never seems to go out of style among the Beltway elite, no matter how often it fails. It’s, yes, disappointing to see a man as smart as Paul falling in line to support this sort of dangerous nonsense.
Ditto on the “saving the planet” shtick. Yes, global warming is a serous problem, but Paul, again, being such a smart guy, should not use such overwrought and emotionally manipulative language, particularly when what we’re talking about here is the “Inflation Reduction Act”,1 which in fact is largely devoted to arresting climate change—by subsidizing American manufacturers—the whole chip thing all over again, and Smoot-Hawley all over again as well. The fact that Paul is willing to pretend that rank protectionism amounts to “saving the planet” simply to get on the Biden train is, frankly, embarrassing. Paul Krugman was once an apostle of free trade. Now he’s an apologist for protectionism. Sad!
Afterwords
In a “subscribers only” opinion piece, Is This The End of Peace Through Trade?, Krugman tries to provide a more “nuanced” take on his rejection of the gospel of free trade, in which I still fervently believe. He unsurprisingly cites Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “proof” that close trading ties don’t preclude conflict, noting that Putin almost surely assumed that western Europe would acquiesce in the invasion for fear of losing Russian oil and gas. Unfortunately, he doesn’t bother to consider, you know, history, which might have explained a few things to him—that if the U.S. had not expanded NATO to include nations formerly within the Soviet bloc, and to propose NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, former members of the old Russian empire, Putin would have had no “need” to invade Ukraine, and everything would be fine (more or less). Again, it’s sad to see a brilliant man naively assuming that, since the U.S. only does what is “right” (as if that were in fact the case), we have the right to do whatever we please and are never responsible for anything that goes “wrong”.
For a better view of the situation, check out Daniel Drezner, the man I love to hate, who explains all too well that the Biden administration is much worse on trade than Donald Trump, whose repeated efforts at “Fuck you” diplomacy never really got off the ground. When Biden was first elected I hoped—wanly enough, as it turned out—that we might begin to make a retreat from the wave of anti-globalism that swept around the world following the Great Recession. Instead, the wave is being institutionalized and will surely acquire a momentum of its own. You know, like the War in Afghanistan.
UPDATE
If you don’t want to take my word for it that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was entirely predictable in light of constant U.S. efforts to make ourselves the de facto dominant power in eastern Europe (though you should), read Peter Beinert’s excellent post at his substack blog reviewing The Back Channel, a memoir written by William Burns, currently head of the CIA and previously a senior U.S. diplomat who spent many years in Moscow. Burns writes in his memoir that he constantly warned the second Bush administration that Ukraine membership in NATO was entirely unacceptable to all Russians, not just the reactionaries around Putin. The notion that bewitches so many ardent idealists, that we Americans can bring freedom to the East, from Warsaw to Vladivostok, is massively self-indulgent and—far worse—actively dangerous.
1. If we actually wanted to reduce inflation, we’d end tariffs and subsidies, not multiply them. Paul knows this, but remains strangely mute on the subject.
